What a year Ryan Gosling is having. In CRAZY, STUPID LOVE (M) he’s the buff Lothario giving lessons in love to staid Steve Carrel. In DRIVE (MA), he’s the existentialist wheelman with all the cool of a contemporary Steve McQueen.
DRIVE is the latest high octane movie from Danish wunderkind Nicolas Winding Refn. Ryan Gosling plays a driver, gainfully employed as a stunt driver in Hollywood movies but who makes a side-bar stash moonlighting as a getaway driver for robbers.
Like the Jason Stratham character in THE TRANSPORTER films, he has his own strict code of principles and rules, the bending of which lands him up the inevitable scatological creek.
Unlike the character in THE TRANSPORTER, this driver is a working class stiff leading a very quiet existence, almost monastic in the chastity and chattels stakes.
When not working as a wheelman legitimately or otherwise, Driver potters around a workshop run by Shannon (Bryan Cranston), the closest thing he has to a friend, who also brokers the illegitimate gigs for the young man.
When Driver’s neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young mother awaiting the release of her husband from prison, brings her car in for a service, a burgeoning relationship blossoms.
On release from prison, her husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac) beseeches the Driver to participate in a heist that is botched by a double cross, complete with a femme fatale, (a sultry, slutty turn by Christina Hendricks) and the Driver goes into overdrive, heading for a head-on collision with a couple of creepy crooks, played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman.
The cinematic love child of BULLITT out of TAXI DRIVER, DRIVE is pitch perfect existential neo noir penned by Hossein Amini from the novel by James Sallis, exquisitely shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, edited by Mat Newman, and with a sizzling score by Cliff Martinez.
(c) Richard Cotter
24th October, 2011
Tags: DRIVE, Nicolas Winding Refn, Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Hossein Amini, James Sallis, Newton Thomas Sigel. Mat Newman, Cliff Martinez.